It costs over half a million U.S. dollars to take a reasonable sized archaeological team to Nikumaroro and keep it there for a month or so, and since our last full-scale expedition--we were on the island on 9-11-01--fundraising for the pursuit of obscure mysteries has become even harder than it used to be. We’re hoping to get a team into the field in 2006, however, with two major jobs.
•More work at the Seven Site. We’d like to clear and closely inspect the surface of the whole site, and carefully excavate some more fire areas. We’d like to do a subsurface survey of it using ground-penetrating radar, in case there’s a grave there. If the bones found on the surface in 1940 were Earhart’s, then Noonan’s remains must be somewhere. We want to plot the extent of the corrugated iron, and try to figure out what it’s there for.
•More work in the village. We’d like to look very closely at the part of the village where the four “dados†have been found. Whatever the things were, they must have been brought to the village in some related set of events. Imported from Kanton Island by a particular group of residents? Found on a wreck someplace? Floated ashore attached to a chunk of wooden floor? Maybe finding out more about the area where they were lying--what buildings stood there, what activities were going on--will help us figure them out. And of course, there may be more airplane parts there.
There are other things we’d like to do, like deep-water exploration of the reef face near where Emily Sikuli and Tapania Taiki reported wreckage, but that sort of work gets frightfully expensive. The reef drops off to abyssal depths, and it’s a long way--about seven miles--down into the abyss. That’s a lot of territory in which to look for small fragments of aluminum and a couple of radial aircraft engines.
There’s another reason, too, for concentrating our work on land. There’s pretty good evidence that we’re losing the island to rising sea levels. The inundation of the atolls of Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, and other low island groups in the Pacific is something that the governments of the area are deeply worried about, and it’s happening all over, at varying rates and in various ways. On Nikumaroro, it’s not that big pieces of the island go underwater and stay there, but--so far--that storm-driven waves reach farther and farther in from the shore, tearing up the land and killing the vegetation. In the 16 years we’ve been going to the island we’ve seen a regular pattern of erosion along the southwest shore, where the big storms tend to come in. Unfortunately, the area of heaviest erosion borders the village. House sites we recorded in 1989--including one that contained one of our “dados,†which we fortunately collected--have disappeared entirely in the years since then. Nikumaroro probably isn’t going to vanish beneath the waves anytime very soon, but a piece of it containing critical evidence could go any time--and perhaps already has.
Meanwhile…
The Nikumaroro hypothesis isn’t the only one whose study can and does employ archaeological methods. In 2004, archaeologists in the Northern Mariana Islands tested one version of the Japanese Capture hypothesis--the Tinian Variant, it might be called. St. John Naftel, a U.S. Marine stationed on Tinian (home of the B-29s that bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki) at the end of World War II, said he had been shown two graves on that island, said to be where the Japanese had executed and buried the aviators. Jennings Bunn, just retired from a position as the U.S. Navy’s archaeologist on Guam, organized a field project to examine the place where Mr. Naftel said he’d seen the graves. Feeling that any hypothesis deserves a test, Karen Burns and I volunteered to help out, as did a number of academic and contract archaeologists on Guam and in the Northern Marianas. We carefully hand-excavated the location Mr. Naftel pointed out, right down to bedrock, and found nothing. Excavation director Mike Fleming then brought in a big gradall and we stripped the surrounding acreage, with no results.
The Northern Marianas Historic Preservation Office is now planning archaeological excavations around the old Japanese jail in Garapan on Saipan, where some variants on the Japanese capture hypothesis say Earhart was incarcerated and perhaps executed. And the deep-ocean exploratory firm Nauticos continues to plan a search for Earhart’s Lockheed on the ocean bottom near Howland Island. What will come of these enterprises remains to be seen.
In TIGHAR’s view, the Nikumaroro hypothesis remains the only one worth spending much time and money on. Planning and fundraising are now underway for a major expedition to the island in 2006.
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